Linux is struggling on the desktop because it only has a small number of "great" apps, according to the Gnome co-creator. Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the Gnome desktop, told tech journalist Tim Anderson at the recent Windows 8 Build conference "When you count how many great desktop apps there are on Linux, you can probably name 10," de Icaza said, according to a post on Anderson's IT Writing blog. "You work really hard, you can probably name 20. We've managed to p*** off developers every step of the way, breaking APIs all the time."

"I do recall Miguel talking in the past about the need for Gnome to keep legacy APIs in place so that applications written years ago can still run without modification today. Perhaps his point was that Gnome is a moving target.

Unfrotunately, both Miguel and the Free Software Foundation tend very much to utterly ignore KDE and Qt applications, which are easily amongst the best free software desktop applications available today.

KDE also features platform abstraction layers such as Phonon and Solid, which effectively will allow applications written (or updated) in the past few years to still run without modification in many years time.

Miguel: "You work really hard, you can probably name 20. We've managed to p*** off developers every step of the way, breaking APIs all the time."

Hey Miguel, I can easily find hundreds of great free software desktop applications. I can even find a great sub-set of these applications (outside of GNOME) which work with an abstraction layer to avoid API breakage!

Enjoy! "

Please also consider the number of users of those existing applications in your DE(GNOME/KDE).